The American Surveillance State Is Here. Can It Be Evaded?

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will
be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways,
by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether youre walking through
a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family
on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or
some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. As I point out
in my new book, A
Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this doesnt
even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web
browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

The revelations by Edward Snowden only scrape the surface in revealing the
lengths to which government agencies and their corporate allies will go to conduct
mass surveillance on all communications and transactions within the United States.

Erected in secret, without any public input, these surveillance programs amount
to an electronic concentration camp which houses every single person in the
United States today. Indeed, government whistleblower Russ Tice, who exposed
the NSAs warrantless surveillance of American phone calls as far back
as 2005, insists that despite Obama administration claims that the NSA is simply
collecting metadata, the NSA is in fact retrieving the contents of emails,
text messages, Skype communications, and phone calls, as well as financial information,
health records, legal documents, and travel documents.

These communications are being stored in the NSAs Utah Data Center, a
massive $2 billion facility that will be handling yottabytes of data (equivalent
to one septillion bytes  imagine a one followed by 24 zeroes) on American
communications. This Utah facility is opening amidst a backlash against NSA
surveillance. Most recently, the Obama administration and the NSA went into
overdrive to quash an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash (R-Mich.) that would
have cut off funds to the NSA if it collects surveillance data on American citizens
who are not under criminal investigation.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and the Washington elite succeeded in defeating the
amendment 217-205. Not surprisingly, many of those who voted down the bill were
also recipients of campaign funds from the lucrative security/surveillance sector.

In the face of such powerful lobbyists working in tandem with our so-called
representatives, any hope of holding onto even a shred of privacy is rapidly
dwindling. Indeed, the life of the average American is an open book for government
agents. As Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of the American surveillance
state, points out, government agencies operate based upon a secret interpretation
of the Patriot Act which allows them to extract massive amounts of data from
third party agencies, enabling them to collect information on bulk medical,
financial, credit card and gun-ownership records or lists of readers of
books and magazines deemed subversive.

Cell phones are equally vulnerable, serving as a combination phone bug,
listening device, location tracker and hidden camera. For example, the
FBI uses the roving bug technique, which allows agents to remotely
activate the microphone on a cellphone and use it as a listening device.

With private corporations also taking advantage of this technology, the outlook
is decidedly grim. In an attempt to mimic the tracking capabilities of online
retailers, brick-and-mortar stores now utilize WIFI-enabled devices to track
the movements of their customers by tracking their phones as they move throughout
the store. The data gathered by these devices include capture rate
(how successful window displays are at pulling people into the store); number
of customers inside the store; customer visit duration and frequency; customer
location within the store; people who walk by the store without coming in; and
the amount of foot traffic around the store.

Americans cannot even drive their cars without being enmeshed in this web of
surveillance. As confirmed by an ACLU report entitled, You Are Being Tracked:
How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans Movements,
the latest developments in license plate readers enable law enforcement and
private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants,
all across the country.

License plate readers work by recognizing a passing license plate, photographing
it, and running the information against a pre-determined database that lets
police know if theyve got a hit, a person of interest, though
not necessarily a suspected criminal. There are reportedly tens of thousands
of these license plate readers now affixed to police cars and underpasses in
operation throughout the country. The data collected from these devices is also
being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private
companies.

Indeed, while all drivers data is being collected, only a fraction of
the data collected constitutes a hit. An even smaller fraction of
those hits actually result in an arrest. Overall, the hit rate for
criminal activity gleaned from the license pictures is usually between .01%
and .3%, meaning that over 99% of the people being unnecessarily surveilled
are entirely innocent.

This is the United States of America today, where liberty and privacy are the
currency for any and all essential services. Short of living in a cave, cut
off from all communications and commerce, anyone living in the concentration
camp that is America today must cede his privacy and liberty to a government
agency, a corporation, or both, in order to access information via the internet,
communicate with friends and family, shop for food and clothing, or travel to
work.

We have just about reached the point of no return. If we do not seize
this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance
laws and practices, we are all going to live to regret it, warned Senator
Wyden. The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown
in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance
state that cannot be reversed.

Author: John W. Whitehead

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and
president of the Rutherford Institute. His new book, The Freedom Wars,
(TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be
contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about the Rutherford
Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

As much as I am totally ticked off that we have somehow allowed country to come to this juncture, reading John's piece today triggered my memories of living in small-town New Mexico where everybody always seemed to know your business, no matter how hard you tried to maintain your privacy.

Leviathan has grown into a small town…it would be funny if it wasn't so scary.

Mark

To quote Tom Waits, "the stiff is froze and the case is closed; on the one that got away."